Many devices communicate with other devices in a shared media environment. Such devices use a common network to transmit and receive data. The transmitted and received data may include any type of transmittable signal, e.g., video, audio, and the like.
In a shared media environment, only one device may transmit data over the network at any given instant in time. Otherwise, if two devices attempt to simultaneously transmit data over a data channel of the network, bus contention or data collision may occur, thereby invalidating the data transmitted from the device(s).
To prevent contention in the network, each device may receive some form of permission or authorization to transmit data via the data channel. For example, the device must receive a token prior to transmitting data or the device may only transmit during a predetermined time frame.
However, devices are subject to malfunctions. For example, the device may have a defective transceiver, and/or poorly written code. In some instances, such a malfunction may cause the device to continuously transmit data over the network. If such transmission of data is unauthorized, e.g., a token has expired for the transmitting device, then the malfunction causes congestion of the network. Such congestion prevents all other devices from using the network to transmit data. Therefore, there is a need in the art to eliminate the network congestion caused by such a malfunctioning device.